Hello, you! I made you a present.
The Kindness BINGO board is full of achievable, small goals that will make you feel good. All you have to do is print a copy and mark off each box as you complete the activity. There are no rules or deadlines. You can choose to work on four in a row or completing the whole board. There’s no pressure, except to think about how to be kind.
Making this is a way I have chosen to be kind to myself at the start of summer vacation.
In normal years, during the last few weeks of my kids’ school year, I’ve brainstormed extravagant projects for our family. Ways to get the most out of our special time. To activate our brains and hearts.
Since my daughters never went back to in-classroom school this year, though, there’s nothing new happening on the first day of summer break, except that they won’t have to log in to see their teachers at specific times. Otherwise it’s more of the same. Continued togethernesstime. Just the four of us and all our pets. All. Summer. Long.
For all the challenges of pandemic life—including the lack of quiet time and the monologues my children tend to deliver while I’m in the middle of writing an essay—it’s actually been pretty great. We’ve had to co-exist. Get along. Communicate even when we’d rather have a break from each other. There’s just nowhere else to go. So we have to figure it out.
That being said, after a year and a half of creating projects, scrounging up supplies, and enforcing MPT (Mandatory Project Time) with thirty minutes’ notice, it’s a gift to myself to create a self-sustaining, do-it-whenever project for my family and all of you lovely newsletter subscribers.
Most of all, I adore it when people do nice things for each other. Sometimes the brainstorming part—figuring out what to do—can take up time and energy that could otherwise be expended on the actual doing. Kindness BINGO is one way to focus your joy-bringing efforts with ease. As I’ve been working on an energy inventory—and acknowledging my chronic health issues—making things less complicated has become important to me in a way that feels new. If many of you participate, I’ll make another version with different activities to share in July!
YOUR BRIGHT SIDE INVITATION: Print a BINGO card for yourself and a few extras for friends, family, or neighbors. If you’re feeling blah, or restless, or upset, pick one activity, do it, then cross it off. Oh, and feel free to share your BINGO card on social media; the credit line and newsletter link are embedded. If you’d rather have a blank card to fill in with your own ideas, or a Word doc version for accessibility reasons, just let me know.
Feel free to leave a comment! I started this newsletter to create an intimate but accessible conversation space about creativity, grief, and the societal reset that the pandemic has offered creatives like us. I’d love to hear your thoughts. You can reply to this email to have a conversation just with me, or you can comment on the post to connect with other readers too.